In This Moment of Distress, California Offers Us Hope

Samuel J. Abrams is Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY and Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

With
the dust from the 2016 Presidential election now settling, Americans
are shocked and unhappy and it appears that a
re-alignment is on the way. Exit
polling data revealed that both Trump and Clinton were viewed
unfavorably by the electorate and a majority of voters stated that
they distrust both candidates. A third of voters had serious concerns
and reservations about their choice in booth and a quarter stated
that their vote was in explicitly a protest vote in opposition to the
other candidates.

None
of this should come as a surprise. Before the 8th
of November, only
37% of Americans believe that the two major parties do an
adequate job representing the citizenry and concerns about
the election and electoral reform along with dissatisfaction with
the government closely followed questions about the economy as
being the most important problem facing the country today. Division,
angst, disgust, frustration, and polarization are words that are
impossible to ignore when we think about our political climate today.

To
many, the Golden State does not appear to be immune to polarization
with regular talk of the effects gerrymandering and
the need for open primaries as many see the parties moving away
from the center and to the extremes.
Academic studies have cited serious political
dysfunction leading
to an inability to pass legislation and govern in the state
while other
studies have
found that California has the nation’s most polarized legislature
with its left-right ideological distance greater than Congress in
Washington, DC. Political parties are moving further
apart and
these divisions are reflected in the often
cited inland/coastal
divide with the coast being dominated by liberal, multicultural
progressives in living a booming tech and media-based economy and an
aging, struggling industrial and agrarian inland region which has
become increasingly conservative over time.

The
2016 Presidential election map of California certainly appears to be
deeply polarized. The coasts were firmly Democratic blue with the
inland going Republican red and 76% of California counties were cases
where one candidate won by 10 or more points. The average margin of
victory for one candidate over the other across the 58 counties was
26 points. Clinton won 32 primarily coastal counties and carried an
average of 62% of the vote in those counties, while Trump won the
remaining 26 inland counties and averaged 58% of vote in those areas.
Certainly, these election day data make a strong case of the
polarization narrative coupled with a deep inland-coastal divide.

Despite
all of this negativity, I have some good news. While California is
not entirely immune to issues of polarization and division, the
aforementioned deep cultural and political divides are simply not as
pronounced or widespread as many observers and pundits would like us
to believe. This is valuable nationally as California and its
politics have become the harbinger of so many future national
socio-political trends. 2016 may seem dire to many, but
Americans are far less divided than it appears.

Some
history is valuable here.

For
decades, one of the most lasting regional spatial models of
California is Wolfinger and Greenstein’s (1969) view that
California of the 1960s was divided between the North and the South
with San Francisco and Los Angeles representing very different
ideological leanings and histories. The view was a natural
outgrowth of an1859 movement by the California legislature to split
the state in two that was eventually disallowed by the US Congress.
Social theorist Carey McWilliams’ (1946) observational ideas on a
north-south division are perhaps the most enduring to this day:

In the vast and
sprawling state of California, most statewide religious, political,
social, fraternal, and commercial organizations are divided into
northern and southern sections…while other states have an east-west
or a north-south division, in no state in the Union is the schism as
sharp as in California. So sharp is the demarcation in
California that when state-wide meetings are held, they are usually
convened in Fresno, long the ‘neutral territory’ for conventions,
conferences, and gatherings of all sort. (4)

Many observers and
pundits alike have expanded on the McWilliam’s sentiments and
continue to believe that Northern Californians tend to look down
on Angelenos as
uncultured, narcissistic hedonists while Southern Californian’s see
northerners as smug, cabernet-swilling liberals in a provincial
tech-bubble and self-congratulatory. Certainly, scholars and
observers have posited numerous other models of California
regionalism, but few have really endured in the public’s mind like
McWilliams’.

In
2008, Dourzet
and Miller
exposed that the north-south model has not been empirically valid
since the 1980s. In its place, is a newer model emerged and that is
of an inland-coastal divide – 20 counties along the Pacific and San
Francisco Bay and 38 counties inland. Korey
(2008) argues that, “Generally
speaking... as one travels from west to east in California, one also
moves from left to right politically” and Drum
(2013) postulates that, “So it's true: California really is two
states. Not northern and southern, though. Unless water is involved,
LA and San Francisco can get along OK. Basically, what this chart
shows is coastal vs. inland. Most of coastal California is as liberal
as its stereotype, while inland California is somewhere to the right
of rural Georgia. Lately, the coastals have taken firm command of
Sacramento, and the inlanders haven't yet figured out how to
respond.” Douzet and Miller (2008) argue that there is “an
increasingly prominent east-west partisan divide that in many ways
replicates the recent national division of liberal “blue” states
on the coasts and the upper Midwest from conservative “red”
states in much of the interior West, lower Midwest, and South.

Historian
Victor Davis Hanson has
written
that, “Driving
across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts
without ever crossing a state line.” He continued by noting that
the inland and coast are “two radically different cultures and
landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite
different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.”
Hanson concluded that California can be characterized as, “a
postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley,
where the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money,
and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to
a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the
northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.”

Historical
narratives of California and the United States consistently focus on
deep divides such that some form of division
seems to be the norm.
In fact, Leo
and Smith’s Two
Californias
initially released in 1983 and republished in 2013, makes the case
that “Millions of people believe wholeheartedly that there are two
Californias,” and “[t]hey feed off each other, enrich each other,
push each other on. It is hard to imagine one without the other”
(93)

So,
while the present historical story appears to be one of division and
where that division exists has changed, I am pleased to report that
these accounts are overblown.

Empirical
data can be very powerful here in really digging into these stories
of disunion and the California Secretary of State just released its
2016 voter
registration report and
very few of the 58 counties in California are actually polarized,
Democratic or Republican strongholds. The widely
used metric
for a polarized, “landslide,” county is when 60% or more of a
county’s voters are registered for one party and in 2016, not
one county met this standard.

In
contrast, close to sixty-percent of California counties met this
landslide standard in the 1960s. The number of landslide counties in
California has plummeted since the 1960s and has hovered around the
zero county mark since 2002. If we relax the standard to 55% for one
party, 5 counties are partisan leaning and those happen to be the
usual Bay Area suspects of Santa Cruz, San Mateo, San Francisco,
Marin, and Alameda with the Los Angeles region notably absent.
Expanding the definition to a simple majority, only 11 counties have
one party with 50% or more of the total registration and – like the
60% landslide metric – the number of counties which meet the simple
majority definition has deeply declined from almost ninety-five
percent in the 1960s to a little under twenty-percent today. These
numbers and huge declines hardly suggest a state with counties that
are deeply partisan and growing further and further apart. The
counties are not polarizing, they are moderating. The figure
below presents this historical data and it is striking.

Landslide
Counties in California by Voter Registration: 1962 - 2016

Of
course, one could argue that counties are not ideal units to look at
questions of partisanship due to gerrymandering. Even with
California's "independent" Citizens Redistricting
Commission, drawing such units where boundaries can and do
change with very
real political
consequences remains a highly politicized process. Fortunately, the Secretary of State provides
registration data by Congressional district as well. Despite concerns
of manipulation to create safe districts for one party or another,
only 4 of California’s 53 Congressional districts are “landslide”
districts at the 60% level (three in LA and one in the Bay Area). At
the 55% level, 7 districts are landslide and at the 50% level, only
13 are landslide counties by voter registration. Once again, it is
hard to argue that California districts are heading off into
different directions politically when only 8% of the Congressional
districts are have 60% landslide partisan majorities before the 2016
elections.

This
story of moderation goes deeper than just these important voter
registration statistics. My own research has examined numerous
other political
and social questions that
regularly present themselves to Californians and I have found little
evidence that the state is pulling apart politically. In fact, when
looking at decades of survey data, the surprising fact that emerges
is that Californians who reside along the coast and inland see the
political world in the same way. Attitudes toward government (its
role in society and its effectiveness), abortion, economic policies,
immigration, environmental regulation, gay rights, satisfaction with
the political system, and electoral behavior and political engagement
are practically identical across regions in the state.

For
instance, over the past two decades, Californians have
been asked which
of two statements comes closer to their view: “The government
should pass more laws that restrict the availability of abortion; or
[2] the government should not interfere with a woman’s access to
abortion.” Plotting the “should not interfere” position, both
the inland and coastal regions have strong majorities—65 and 71
respectively—by 2014 and the positions not only tracked over 14
years, they barely moved and even converged in 2011 at 70 percent
arguing for not interfering with a woman’s right to choose.
Abortion has long been a central issue in the so-called culture wars,
but it is barely a skirmish geographically in California.

When
elite level politicians and organizations present polarized
choices and candidates, citizens feel that their voices are not being
heard and that they must select between the lesser of two evils.
Consequently, electoral results can and often do appear extreme and
small localized differences can make regions appear drastically
different from one another. Localized party behavior in terms
party organizing, framing of issues, outreach and mobilization, along
with overall electoral competitiveness of the particular places
distort reality and leave Californians stuck making choices that they
do not like.

The
new 2016 voter registration data from the California Secretary of
State along with the public opinion data show that Californians are
far less extreme and partisan in one direction or the other than data
which only looks at electoral outcomes. By being able to opt-out of
making a party decision, voter registration data reveals
that California has not turned into a state with deep
political-geographic divisions or has many counties or Congressional
districts that are tilted to the extreme in either direction. While
the historical evidence from the 1960s reveals that there were real
political divides in the state, they have disappeared today. This is
a perfect example of where some historical data can robustly speak to
these analytic narratives and really show that not all are correct.

I
believe that this data all reveals that Californians want reasonable
and thoughtful politicians and policy proposals. Just looking at
electoral results and choices distort the reality that clearly shines
through in the registration data. Polarized choices in the voting
booth that emanate from a polarized, primary process do not regularly
reflect the interests of the masses and lead to the polarized
outcomes that we just saw on Election Day. The question for now is
when will Californians demand more from their parties and when will
these political elites actually listen to their very own
constituents? 2016 publicized the fact that candidates on both the
left and right were out of touch with the people and the primaries
illustrated how cracked these partisan bases actually are. There is
a huge opportunity here for Californians need practical and pragmatic
leadership. The party and candidates that actually represent these
moderate ideas and listens to the people has a lot to gain after the
craziness of the 2016 election cycle.